Cloaked in Her Own Secrecy : CHANEL A Woman of Her Own <i> by Axel Madsen (Henry Holt: $19.95; 364 pp.; 0-8050-0961-2) </i>
Few fashion designers have left a legacy as permanent, as rich or as imitated as that of Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel. Her creations--exquisite little black dresses, collarless jackets trimmed with gold buttons and braid, black-tipped spectator pumps, quilted handbags, the understated floral notes of Chanel No. 5--remain benchmarks of superb, elegant taste.
Dark, thin, pretty Gabrielle Chanel rose from nowhere to become the reigning priestess of streamlined high-fashion for almost 60 years. 329) But for all her fame and fortune, her string of impressive lovers and her powerful influence on style, she died a lonely woman--determined to take to the grave as much of her story as she could.
“She made up things,” Axel Madsen says immediately. “She reinvented her childhood. . . . After she became rich, she paid off her brothers to pretend they didn’t exist.”
Above all, she was ashamed of her initial poverty and the fact that her parents, itinerant market peddlers, were unmarried when she was born. During her life she would claim she was raised by old-maid aunts. But in reality, after her mother died and her father disappeared, 12-year-old Chanel and her two sisters were placed in an orphanage.
When she was 21, working as a seamstress and residing in the military town of Moulins, Chanel met Etienne Balsan, a rich bachelor with a passion for racehorses. She spent six years as mistress of his estate, Royallieu, where she learned to ride, to mix with society and to set herself apart. Instead of wearing ready-made millinery, she bought straw boaters, intended for schoolboys, and trimmed them with ribbons and lace. Soon she was making hats for other women in her circle.
At Royallieu, she was introduced to Arthur (Boy) Capel, a wealthy Englishman who became the love of her life. After they ran off to Paris together, Chanel opened the millinery shop of her dreams--thanks to Balsan (a truly good sport), who lent her an apartment for the venture, and to Capel, who helped finance it.
Next came a boutique on Rue Cambon, the street where Chanel Inc. can be found today, followed by another in Deauville. There, Madsen says, “she invented sports clothes” and became the first designer to turn wool jersey--considered too lifeless for anything but underwear--into chic sportswear.
Step by step, her professional life soared. But long-lasting love eluded her. (She would always maintain she had never wanted to marry and lose her independence.) Boy Capel wed an English aristocrat and died in an automobile accident while in France and planning to see Chanel one more time. The Duke of Westminster, her lover for 10 years, also left her for an English aristocrat--one who could bear him a child, which Chanel could not. Her friends gossiped that she would marry Paul Iribe, but the artist and set designer collapsed and died on her tennis court in the middle of a game.
Chanel’s whole life was a tough game of chance in which she won more often than she lost. For years, the deal she struck with Pierre and Paul Wertheimer for Chanel No. 5 was the bane of her existence, but it eventually proved a godsend: The Wertheimers bankrolled her return to fashion in 1954 after a 15-year absence. The French spurned the collection, calling it passe, but when it received rave reviews in America, Chanel’s career was reborn. Even her alleged collaboration with the Nazis during World War II was swept under the carpet because she supposedly knew too many British secrets to go on trial. Her suspected collaboration was tied to a wartime romance with German diplomat Hans Gunther von Dincklage (“Spatz” to his friends) and her insistance on living at the Ritz Hotel along with the occupying Germans.
Her escapades and her pals--such as Colette, Cocteau, Diaghilev and Stravinsky--were never short on glamour and intrigue. Yet Madsen paints a dull, confusing picture. On page after page, the reader finds little more than a jumbled band of colorless stick figures, borrowed heavily from previous biographers, such as Paul Morand.
If, as Madsen often repeats, Chanel was determined to remain a mystery; if she sent away in abject confusion even those to whom she chose to tell some of her story, why does he try his hand nearly 20 years after her death? With nothing fresh to contribute, he has woven an awkward, ill-fitting tale of a woman who devoted her life to magnificently constructed garments--and to secrecy.
